Game design and other babbling, by Charles Randall

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Dark Souls PC Controversy Follow-up

There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding of what I’ve written about Dark Souls PC, so I’d like to clear things up.

1. I don’t know that any of this stuff is applicable to Dark Souls PC. I’m simply speaking from experiences I’ve had in 15 years of game development.

2. I’m not saying any of these things are necessarily even reasonable; simply that I have seen them argued by people in positions to make decisions in the past. It applies because it’s possible that someone at From Software may have made any of these kinds of decisions for either technical or artistic reasons.

3. This is not a defense of the final quality of the PC version. Frankly, I’m as disappointed as anyone else that I won’t get an awesome PC version. I have a monster gaming PC and I love to use it. But I’m still going to play this game until the heat death of the universe, and a PC version facilitates that much better than the console version. Assuming the port even *runs* on my machine. After all this hullabaloo I don’t even know if it will.

4. Some of the arguments against my theories don’t take into account that From Software is doing a port with very little time, resources, or experience; most of these points wouldn’t apply to a larger studio with more time/money/resources. They definitely don’t apply to *any* studio that has done PC development at all in the past. People making PC games have solved all these problems decades ago.

5. I would not personally choose to limit framebuffer/framerate for any reason other than “It simply breaks the game in a way we cannot fix.” I am simply shedding light on some concepts that may have influenced their decisions. I think point 8 and 9 definitely have the potential to land here, the rest not as much. But they are still things that may have influenced their decision overall.

6. People who don’t think Dark Souls is one of the greatest games ever made are in the same category of people who wouldn’t be able to appreciate a fine vintage of wine, or who think it’s okay to put ketchup on hamburgers.

I know it’s been a while since you wrote this, but here in Brazil, more specifically in Rio de Janeiro, people put ketchup on pizza.

I live in São Paulo, and pizza with ketchup here is considered heresy.

Furthermore, all these people complaining about the Dark Souls PC port bought the game anyway, so what’s the point in complaining? My rig runs the game at 1280×720, with a few slowdowns every now and then, but I’m still able to play. The only downside is the lack for onscreen instructions when you don’t use a XBox controller for Windows. My overall impression was that they simply CTRL+C the XBox version, and CTRL+V into Windows, with a few UI tweaks.